I like Evernote and I use it constantly. I was using it today, in fact when – BOOM! – in the middle of a meeting, without any warning, a notice came up in my iPhone app that blocked my access to my notes and said my subscription has just ended. Like, literally, that very second, right in the middle of that very meeting.

I couldn’t do anything with Evernote until I renewed my subscription.

Okay, but, excuse me, Evernote? I’m kind of in a meeting right now…? Can I finish taking notes and deal with this later, please? Apparently not.

After the meeting I go back to my desk. I open Evernote on my Mac. BOOM! Another “renew now or else” notice pops up. That was kind of expected. But, hey, waitaminnit… the subscription fee is different. On the iPhone they wanted $70. On the Mac they want $50.

This is disconcerting. Enough that I want to sort out the discrepancy. But I’m working. I decide to deal with it later. (Plus, I think I have an unused code in the back of an old Evernote Moleskine at home that’ll get me a few free months…)

Back home, I find the Moleskine with the code, log in to the Evernote web site to try and use it and – BOOM – hammered again with that renewal notification. But, hey, there’s another different number on this renewal notice: $58.

I know I need to renew Evernote. Heck, I want to renew Evernote. Right now I just want to give them money and get on with my life. But I’m confused. This doesn’t make sense.

I hate giving money to companies that confuse and frustrate me.

There are three different rates I’ve seen for the same Premium service.

Evernote app on iPhone: $70

Evernote app on Mac: $50

Evernote web site: $58

Which do I choose?

You’re thinking, duh: the cheapest one. But here’s the catch: I’m in Canada. So if that $50 subscription is in US dollars, that’s like a million dollars Canadian. Okay, not quite that much. But it’s a full $70, the same as the highest price.

So the new, added question is: what currency are these fees being charged in?

I could make some assumptions. Like, because iPhone apps have to charge fees through the App Store, and my account is with the Canadian App Store, that’s $70 Canadian.

And it might be that the subscription fees identified in the Mac app and Evernote web site are US dollars, right? (In which case, anyway, shouldn’t the rates in the Mac app and the web site be the same?)

Or maybe Evernote directly charges its customers in their local currency?

I don’t know. It’s all very confusing.

I tried getting in touch with Evernote today for an answer but they were incommunicado.

In the meantime, until I am empowered with the knowledge that will clear up this clusterfuck of a pricing dilemma, the Evernote apps are blocking my access to my notes. Which totally sucks.

Day One

Bloom released a major new version of Day One for Mac and iOS last week. And it’s a beautiful thing. But it’s a very expensive beautiful thing: $56 for the Mac app and $14 for the iOS app (after the introductory 50% off sale ends next week). That’s a total of $70 for full-on cross-platform journaling. Very, very not cheap.

Day One is a capable enough journaling app. You can post text entries to your journal, and you can attach multiple photos to an entry. Day One will automatically tag your entries with your location and the weather. You know, the basics.

I like Day One. It’s well designed and covers all the basics of journaling. But its feature set is relatively limited, and its design is uninspired and rather blasé.

My major problem with this new version, though, is that Bloom went for a proprietary solution to sync your data between its iOS and Mac apps. So you’re storing your valuable, personal journal data in a closed ecosystem. It’s relatively difficult to get your data out of it and you can only ever use Day One to look at it. You are entirely dependent on this little American company called Bloom to maintain and safeguard your valuable, private journal data. If Bloom bites it, or if you decide to move away from iOS or Mac… not pretty.

Awesome Note

It’s worth stating at the outset that Awesome Note is not designed specifically to be a journaling app. But that’s one of the things it does, and it does really, really well. Awesome Note can easily match Day One, feature for feature (and more, actually), at a fraction of the price. Awesome Note costs just $8: $4 for the iPad app and $4 for the iPhone app (you buy them separately). Chump change.

Like Day One, Awesome Note is also beautifully designed and easy to use. I prefer the Awesome Note interface to Day One.

There isn’t a version of Awesome Note for Mac, but that’s okay. Because instead of a proprietary sync solution, Awesome Note can use Evernote to store and sync notes in the cloud. So on your Mac (or Windows computer, for that matter) you can just use the excellent Evernote client.

And there’s the real benefit of Awesome Note: your data is not trapped in a closed, proprietary environment. Should BRID, the small company behind Awesome Note ever disappear and its apps die*, your data is safe in the data store of the massive, secure Evernote machine.

Anyway, beyond basic syncing, Evernote opens up Awesome Note to a world of extensibility, because Evernote can hook into almost any online service out there. Like the insanely awesome IFTTT.

Day One is ignorant of what you do on social media. And because it’s such a closed platform, you can’t push anything into it. But with Awesome Note syncing through Evernote, you can have IFTTT publish whatever you do on whatever social platform you use to an Awesome Note notebook via Evernote. And then over time, automagically, Awesome Note will build up a history of your online exploits.

There are a couple other areas where I think Awesome Note improves on Day One.

Customization

In Awesome Note, you can customize pretty much every aspect of the interface with colour, texture, and icons. With Day One, I hope you like blue and white. Because that’s all you get. Brrrr.

Integration

Awesome Note integrates with your the calendar and reminders on your iPad or iPhone. So, if you want, you can view your life activites and tasks juxtaposed against information you’ve stored in your journal. This provides a lot of personal insight.

I suppose the one major caveat to Awesome Note is that, to sync, it requires a little bit more custom configuration. You have to step outside of the app to set up an Evernote account if you don’t already have one. But I think that little bit of extra effort is worth it for the cost savings, added features, and improved interface. (All that said, Awesome Note will also sync via Apple’s iCloud, if you prefer an easier-to-set-up but more closed system.)

Day One is attracting a lot of attention these days, thanks to Apple, and I’m sure that’s resulting in a lot of sales. But if you read this, consider Awesome Note instead. I think you’ll prefer it.

* That’s a real concern, actually. At just $4 per app, you have to wonder how BRID is making any money at this. I highlighted that low cost as a benefit, but I really think Awesome Note should cost more. The total $8 price tag for both iPad and iPhone apps is simply not representative of the incredible value. If it were me, I’d doduble the price of each app. I hope BRID survives and continues to deliver new versions of Awesome Note, and I’d encourage them to increase their prices to improve the likelihood of that.

Northwestel reduced the cost of its internet over-use penalty fee yesterday, to $1.50 per GB from $2 per GB. Of course, any reduction in the cost that Northwestel charges for internet service is welcome. So on behalf of internet users across northern Canada, I want to say thanks to Northwestel.

But yesterday’s reduction is not enough. Northwestel can, and should, do more to reduce the internet service costs that northern Canadians are forced to pay. We still pay much, much more than our southern compatriots.

I’ll do a quick comparison of internet service rates here in Whitehorse, Yukon, a town of about 28,000 people, and Dawson Creek, BC, a town of about 11,500 people that’s just 1,400 km away down the Alaska Highway.

At the top end of consumer packages, northerners will pay Northwestel $190 for 400 GB of monthly data. That’s 47.5¢ per GB. If you live in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, you’ll pay Shaw $123 for 800 GB of data. That’s 15.4¢ per GB.

On the low end of the package spectrum northerners will pay $42 for 10 GB of monthly data. That’s an insanely expensive rate of $4.20 per GB being charged to people who are probably the lowest wage earners in the North. You’d do better at this package level to simply ask Northwestel to charge all your data at its penalty rate.

Low income earners in Dawson Creek, by comparison, can pay Shaw $35 for 65 GB of data. That’s about 54¢ per GB, still very expensive, but about one-seventh the cost of Northwestel’s cheapest package rate.

Northwestel’s newly-reduced penalty rate of $1.50 per GB is still three times more than the fee levied on data in the company’s high end package. And its in-plan data fees at all levels are still much too expensive when compared to the rates southern Canadians pay.

Interestingly, Shaw does not punish its customers with data over-use penalties. They are permitted to exceed their monthly data limits from time to time at no extra cost.

One closing thought. You can buy a litre of gas in Dawson Creek for about 92¢ this morning. You can buy a litre of gas in Whitehorse for the same price (at the Porter Creek Super A, in case you’re wondering).

Is a virtual commodity like internet data really that much more expensive to deliver to the North than a physical commodity like gas?

The telecommunications industry in Canada is an illogical racket. There’s a pastiche of competition but really, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a Bell is a Rogers is a Telus. Telecommunications plans are notoriously expensive in Canada and they can be fraught with risk of huge additional expense if you don’t plan your use and keep a close eye on it. If a consumer wants to look out for her own interests and keep her costs down, she has to get smart and learn how to sidestep the pitfalls and take advantage of pricing loopholes. This post represents one recipe for hacking your phone bill in this spirit.

Why Hack Your Phone Bill?

There are a couple of good reasons to hack your phone bill.

First, it’s too expensive. The main expense on your bill is what I call a “voice and text channel” that you probably don’t really use. It makes a lot of sense to cut that out.

Second, your data plan requires you to commit up from to a “worst case” data use scenario. Then, if things go downhill from there, you get HAMMERED with extremely expensive data over-use charges. It makes a lot of sense to make your data use fees depend on what you actually use, and reduce the risk of incurring super-expensive over-use fees.

First Ingredient: An Unlocked Phone

The first important ingredient in the recipe is an unlocked phone. That doesn’t mean you have to spend $1000 on the latest cutting edge smartphone. There are plenty of great unlocked phones you can buy brand new for perfectly reasonable prices. Here’s a quick list of some decent unlocked, affordable phones you can buy at the time of this writing:

It’s making more and more sense every day to buy your phone outright and unlocked from somewhere other than one of the big telecommunications providers. In fact, make sure you don’t buy your phone from one of those guys — they mark the devices up significantly.

No matter what you do, you should be using an unlocked device. With most carriers, subscribing to a “BYOP” (Bring Your Own Phone) plan will save you $20 right off the bat every month. (Note that Bell is the only carrier in Canada that won’t offer you this saving. See “Bell raises monthly share plan prices, eliminates BYOD benefits” on Mobile Syrup.)

Alternatively, don’t even use a phone. Instead, use a tablet, or even a notebook computer. This post recommends the use of an app that can be installed on pretty much any device. So you might not even need a phone, depending on how you like to communicate.

Second Ingredient: A Tablet Data Plan

The second absolutely key ingredient in this recipe is what’s generally referred to as the “tablet data plan”. That’s a plan that only some carriers offer. They are intended to be used only with tablets, not phones. But there’s nothing stopping the savvy customer like you from taking the SIM card with the tablet data plan on it out of your tablet and putting it in to your phone. It’ll still work, no problem.

The tablet data plan solves three problems that are inherent in traditional mobile phone plans:

You pay just for the data you use, instead of over-paying up-front for data you may not use.

You don’t have to pay for a service that you may not use much: voice and text.

Only Pay for the Data You Use

With a traditional mobile phone plan you have to mitigate your risk of expense by making an educated guess in advance about the amount of data you might use in a month. For example, say I sign up for a plan with Telus that includes up to 7 GB of data. That’ll cost me $65 every month. What if I only use 1 GB of data in a month? Well, then I just paid $65 for 1 GB of data. Ouch.

Tablet data plans work on a sliding scale of use. They generally start at about $5 for a measly 10 MB of data. Here’s Telus’ rate schedule for its tablet-only Flex Data Plan:

As you can see, by using a tablet data plan, I’d right away save $40 on that 1 GB of data.

But the tablet data plan’s upper-limit threshold is generally 5 GB, as you can see above. What happens if I wanted to use that full 7 GB in a month?

This brings me to the next point…

Avoid Expensive Data Charges

Tablet data plans generally cover costs for data use up to a certain limit, or ceiling. In Telus’ case, on the rate schedule above, it’s “Up to 5 GB”. What’s data going to cost beyond that, though? The rate schedule reads, “+5¢/MB”. But what does that even mean? And why is the cost represented per MB all of a sudden when all of the other costs are represented per GB?

Simple explanation: it’s a dupe. Here’s a dirty little industry secret: when a carrier quotes data prices per MB, you know it’s crazy expensive. MB represents a relatively small unit of data measure compared to a GB. So quoting costs per MB is a way of reducing a consumer’s perception of a cost to its lowest possible level, regardless of what the total cost might be. It’s the equivalent of the telemarketer’s, “For a low monthly payment of…!”

Let’s convert those MB back to GB. There are 1,024 MB in a GB. So, 1024 x .05…

Whoa! 1 GB of extra data cost with Telus costs a whopping $51.20! That is an insanely expensive price for a GB of data, even by Canadian standards.

So if I swapped out Telus’ $65 monthly fee for 7 GB of data with a voice plan for 7 GB of data on a tablet data plan I’d end up paying $147.40 every month! That hurts. Tablet data plans don’t seem to make any sense all of a sudden.

Rogers has three separate tablet data plan price categories, compared to Telus’ one, which makes things a little more complicated. But for this discussion, I’ll draw your attention to the notes at the bottom of the left column, which is most comparable to Telus’ sole rate schedule. It reads: “$10/GB if usage is greater than 5GB”.

Wow. Telus will charge you $51.20 for the same thing! Rogers’ extra data-use fees are one-fifth of the price of Telus’ data. But the plot thickens. Check out the next two columns: the cost per GB goes down to $5 – one-tenth of Telus’ price!

So that 7 GB of data on Rogers’ low-end tablet data plan would cost me $60. That’s cheaper than Telus’ $65 fee for the same thing with a voice plan. But, again, if I didn’t use that much data in a month, I would pay less. If I used less than 5 GB of data, I’d only pay $40.

This price schedule seems very similar to Telus’, but with one very important difference. Remember how I said, if a carrier advertises data at a price per MB it’s going to be crazy expensive? Well, Bell doesn’t even disclose the fees that it charges for extra data on its web site (or they’re cleverly hidden, which is worse). So you can be pretty certain it’s going to be super insanely out-of-this-world crazy expensive. Bottom line: stay away from Bell. If a service provider doesn’t disclose a cost, that generally means you don’t want to pay it.

What about the carriers’ subsidiary discount brands? It’s a bit of a mixed bag here. Two of them, Koodo and Fido, don’t seem to offer tablet data plans. But the third, Virgin, offers a very attractive option:

And here’s the best bit:

Indeed, that is good to know. It’s a surprising dose of transparency from Bell’s little brother. Virgin’s extra data is twice the cost of Rogers’ cheapest, but still one-fifth of Telus’.

So, that 7 GB of data from Virgin? $60. (Again, compared to Telus’ $65.) If I use less than 5 GB, though, I’ll just pay $40. And if I have a really light month and can keep my data use under 1 GB, I’ll just pay $20. I’ll always pay $65 with Telus.

So you can begin to see how the pricing structure for tablet data plans makes sense: they can save you money, because they are based around real monthly use, rather than wild guesses in advance; and, if you pick the right one, you can reduce your risk of expensive data over-use fees.

But there’s one more cost-saving aspect of the tablet data plan…

Don’t Pay for What You Don’t Use

If you’re like me, the number of times you make a phone call every month has dwindled to almost imperceptible levels. Instead, I’m doing video calls on FaceTime or using Google Hangouts or Facebook Messenger to make voice calls.

Even if you do still make a lot of traditional phone calls, don’t you hate the way the carriers count your minutes? And doesn’t the concept of the “long distance” call that you have to pay extra for seem a tad anachronistic? And don’t their voice plans just seem really, really expensive? And why are you still paying extra for voice mail?

Bottom line: the carriers want you to keep ordering voice services from them because it’s an existing lucrative revenue stream for them that we perceive to have value. But that’s crazy. You can actually have your cake and eat it, too, with a tablet data plan. You can shave money off your phone bill but still keep your traditional phone line.

With your traditional mobile phone plan you pay for two “channels”.

That’s crazy. There’s no reason for this. The voice and text channel represents a significant expense on most mobile phone bills — at least $30. But, really, the voice and text channel on your mobile device is superfluous.

Because you can do this:

You’ve probably heard of something called VOIP. It stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. It’s a techy way of saying you’ll send and receive all your voice calls over the Internet using a special app, along with all your other data like web browsing and watching Netflix, instead of over a special channel just for voice. Your text messages can go that way, too, no problem.

You can still make normal phone calls using VOIP, and you’ll still have a regular phone number. Instead of paying for an extra channel for phone calls, though, you can save a huge portion of that money and everything will just get sent over the Internet. The only difference is that you’ll use a special VOIP app to make and receive phone calls instead of your phone’s native phone app.

There are a ton of VOIP app options for mobile phones. In this post I’m going to refer to just one: Line 2. No, they’re not sponsoring this post or anything like that. I actually pay for my service with them. I can just vouch for the quality of their service because I use it, and am most familiar with them. If you have a different VOIP service you prefer on your mobile device, it’ll work just as well.

So, to sum things up so far, you can save a ton of money off your phone bill by getting a SIM card with a tablet data plan for your unlocked mobile phone (or tablet, or computer) and using a VOIP app instead of your phone’s native phone app.

This makes even more sense when you consider that most VOIP services include every telephone feature imaginable at one flat rate that’s lower than the base price for services from the carriers.

Line2, for example, includes visual voicemail, unlimited texting, and unlimited long distance calling in Canada and the US for just $10 US per month (that’s about $14 Canadian these days).

You’d pay Bell $72 for that same level of service and you only get unlimited long distance calling in Canada. At Rogers you’d pay $55, but that doesn’t include voice mail or unlimited calling in even Canada. Telus will charge you $40 per month for a plan that includes unlimited calling only in Canada, but no voicemail.

And therein lies another benefit of simplicity: there’s one flat rate plan and it includes everything. There are no surprises. The plans from the carriers are designed to be as arcane and confusing as possible, in the spirit of wringing more money out of you with obscure extra fees.

One more bonus to the VOIP method: you can install your phone number on pretty much any device. So you can make and receive calls, text, and check your voicemail not only from your phone, but also your tablet and computer.

So hacking the voice and text channel off your phone bill will remove a significant cost even as it improves the level of service you receive.

By the way, my fellow northern Canadians will probably wonder if you can get a number from Line2 with an 867 area code. Yes, you can. You can also transfer your existing 867 number to Line2.

Scenarios

That’s a lot of information, so I cooked up some scenarios to try and give a real-world sensibility to it all. I’ve examined just two carriers here, though, Telus and Virgin, for purely self-serving reasons.

As of this writing, I’m a Telus customer and I’m looking at alternatives, so I’m using its information as a baseline. The only alternative I’m considering is Virgin because they offer a tablet data plan with reasonable data fees. Rogers isn’t available in northern Canada, so I unfortunately can’t consider it. Bell is generally comparable or slightly more expensive than Telus in all categories. Plus it has proven itself to be hostile to customers, so I’ve ruled it out for that reason alone.

To start, here’s a simple chart that presents four common cost scenarios. So, to explain the chart above a little. This chart examines four scenarios, each of which include 1 GB of data from a service provider.

The first bar, “Full TELUS Service” represents the total monthly cost associated with subscribing to a plan that includes both the voice and text channel and the data channel. As you can see, it’s quite expensive.

The second bar, “Full Virgin Service” represents the same service as the first bar, but from Bell’s discount subsidiary, Virgin. There’s a $10 monthly cost saving here, just by moving away form one of the “big three”.

The final two bars represent services based on those tablet data plans combined with voice and text service from Line2. If you compare the “Full TELUS Service” scenario to the “Line 2 with TELUS Data”, you can see a cost savings of almost $26 each month just by switching to a tablet data plan. The “Line 2 with Virgin Data” is significantly cheaper than full service from Telus.

But let’s mix things up here a bit to really examine the benefits the the tablet data plan. What if you went over 1 GB of data in a month?

Ouch! This is where we see that expensive Telus data really kicking in. There’s now a $72 gap between the full Telus service and the combined Virgin with Line2 service. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

But we’re talking relatively light use in this scenario. What about a more average scenario, like if a person used around 5 GB of data every month?

Right off the bat, the combined Virgin tablet data plan with Line2 is $30 cheaper and includes 1 GB more data than a full Telus plan. Again, though, what happens when data use goes over by 1 GB?

Yeah, that’s not pretty on the Telus end of things. But what if things were even worse that month? Like, 4 GB over the limit?

This is where we really start to see the benefit of the pricing model behind the tablet data plan. On the far left, with a total of 8 GB data use in a month – 4 GB in plan, 4 GB in excess – on a traditional Telus mobile phone plan, you’re looking at a nearly $300 bill. But on the far right, with a total of 9 GB of data use on a Virgin tablet data plan, the bill is still under $100.

Closing

So there it is, my argument for hacking your mobile phone bill by using a combination of a tablet data plan and an unlocked device. There’s a lot of information here, but it’s not too complicated. I’ll provide a simple step-by-step here:

Acquire an unlocked smartphone or tablet

Purchase a Virgin SIM card with a tablet data plan

Put the Virgin SIM card in your smartphone or tablet

Install the Line2 app on your smartphone

Subscribe to Line2

Have your existing phone number ported to Line2

Cancel your existing mobile phone plan

Now go forth and save money!

Update

For Whitehorse residents, if you go into The Source and they tell you that you need to have a Virgin account for a minimum of 3 months before you can set up a tablet data plan, this isn’t accurate. Just ask to purchase a Virgin SIM card (it’ll cost you a whopping $5) and call Virgin directly at 1-888-999-2321. Speak to someone in sales and they’ll help you set up the SIM card with a tablet data plan no problem.

I’m just back from a leisurely week visiting family in Vancouver. I made the decision before I left to use my iPhone exclusively for taking pictures. I’m a heavy iPhone user on an average day. Leaving my camera at home and relying completely on my iPhone for picture taking meant I’d be using it a lot more.

Last Tuesday we planned to visit the light show at the VanDusen Botanical Garden. I knew the evening would be chilly and I’d want to take a lot of pictures, so I instinctively checked the battery on my iPhone. It was at a 75% charge level. I was astonished. Cole and I had been out most of the day and it was already late afternoon. I had expected to see a level of around 20%.

You see, over the years I’ve had terrible experiences with the batteries in my iPhones. I’d generally get to mid-afternoon every day before I had to plug the devices in to recharge them, often even earlier on cold days, since iPhones have always hated cold weather (and by “cold,” I mean Apple’s wussy California perspective of anything under 10ºC).

I hadn’t even noticed that I’d stopped doing this with my iPhone 6s Plus. And it only hit me that day last week: the battery in the iPhone 6s Plus kicks ass. I’m getting through entire days of heavy use without a need to recharge. And I’m talking about 15 to 17 hours of use, from about 5am to 9 or 10 at night, taking pictures, playing games, tracking runs, and doing tons of web browsing. My iPhone is my most-used device, so it doesn’t spend much time in my pocket. Over the past week I’ve noticed that when I plug the device in to power at night, it’s still rocking a 35% to 40% charge.

Somewhere between the iPhone 6 Plus and the iPhone 6s Plus, or maybe somewhere between iOS 8 and iOS 9, Apple made tremendous improvements to the way iOS devices manage power. The iPhone battery was for a long time the daily primary pain point for me. That’s gone away. The iPhone battery, at least in the 6s Plus, is astoundingly good now.

It got close. OneDrive was promising as a universal, cross-platform cloud storage solution. But recently Microsoft dropped the ball. And it’s worse than what it was back in 2009.

On Mac OS and iOS OneDrive is a turd. And it’s been a turd for a long time now. But I was in denial about it. My friends got sick of me championing OneDrive. There were a lot of problems that I struggled through and I stuck with OneDrive. But recent events have finally woken me up to the stench of the environment and I’ve decided to flush it down the toilet.

There’s the case of the unlimited-storage broken promise, for example.

There’s the fact that OneDrive and OneDrive Business remain an unreconciled confusing brand of misfit tech.

There’s the fact that the OneDrive Mac desktop client fails catastrophically and requires you to reconfigure the software and re-sync your content every time you name a file with one-too-many characters. Yeah, that bug is years old.

In fact, if you look at the OneDrive client for Mac the wrong way it crashes.

Plus OneDrive is just slow. Painfully slow. It’s slow on the web. The apps are slow. I could walk downtown and back faster than OneDrive syncs files from the cloud to my Mac.

Then take the big deal Microsoft recently about real-time online multi-user collaboration inside of Office documents. You know, stuff that you’ve been able to do in Google Docs for years. And it worked for a little while. Until it didn’t. All of a sudden access to shared OneDrive files and folders just stopped working in Mac OS and iOS. And without access to shared files and folders there’s really not a lot of collaborating you can do.

I tried to get support for the problem several times over the past few weeks. I called Office support. They said, on numerous occasions, that it’s a OneDrive problem. Go talk to them.

So I texted with OneDrive support (they don’t offer phone support). They told me it’s an Office problem. Go talk to them.

So there I was, a frustrated customer stuck between the rock of Office and the hard place of OneDrive. But I wanted to get the problem solved. I had crap tons of stuff stored on OneDrive. So I allowed myself to be bounced back and forth between these two unhelpful support resources countless times. And each interaction consumed hours of time.

Like, last week I spent almost 3 hours on the phone with an Office support representative named Zef. She screen-shared my Mac to investigate the problem. She uninstalled and re-installed Office twice. (Uninstalling Office from a Mac is a complex, manual 30-step process that alone takes a good twenty minutes. “If you want an Office uninstaller you have to get Windows,” explained Zef.) She uninstalled and reinstalled the OneDrive client at least 10 times. She renamed my Mac’s hard drive without my permission. She desperately reorganized files and folders that had nothing to do with Office or OneDrive just to try and look busy.

When she finally recognized that simply repeating basic troubleshooting steps again and again and again won’t produce changed outcomes she desparately tried to turf me off to OneDrive support. I told her OneDrive support would just tell me to come back to Office support. I asked for a higher level of Office support. She said she wouldn’t do that because she’d just get in trouble from her supervisor. I insisted.

Begrudgingly, she acceded. She transferred me. The level two tech support guy asked me for my case number. Zef hadn’t given me one. Too bad, said level 2 tech support guy. We can’t look those up. You have to start all over again with level 1. But we’re closed now. So call back tomorrow.

And you know what? I did. I actually called back the next day and spent another couple hours on the phone with a different level one knob just to get back up to level 2 in hopes that there’d be a better level of support there.

There isn’t. The level 2 guy just repeated all the stuff the level one people did and wasted another hour of my life. He ran out of stuff to try, too, when I refused to let him uninstall Office yet again.

“Okay then. We’ll investigate and get back to you later today with a solution,” explained the level two guy in frustration. That was a week ago.

I’ve logged well over 15 hours of time interacting with Microsoft support. 15 hours of my life I’ll never get back. And I’m no better off for it.

In the meantime, I’ve been forced to devise all sorts of time-consuming workarounds to keep OneDrive sort of working. I’ve made all sorts of excuses to friends and colleagues to defend the disastrous state of OneDrive.

Then I woke up Friday morning and had a revelation. Fuck. This. Shit.

Because that’s what OneDrive is. Utter, complete and total shit. It looks like shit. It smells like shit. And it functions about as well as a you’d expect a turd to.

So I spent some time this weekend using Mover.io to get all of my stuff off of OneDrive and over to Dropbox.

It’s a breath of fresh air. The Dropbox client is rock solid on both Mac and iOS. It hasn’t crashed once all weekend and I’ve been pushing it to the limit.

And it’s fast. Where I had to wait for OneDrive to sync changes from the cloud to my Mac, Dropbox syncs occur instantaneously.

Then there’s the fact that there’s really good Microsoft Office integration built right into Dropbox. What does anybody even need the shitstorm called OneDrive for anymore?

There’s a certain weight off my back. My battle against OneDrive and Microsoft is over.

But there’s also egg on my face. I can’t believe I supported OneDrive for as long as I did. I’m going to be pretty sheepish about that for a while.

At least I recognize it now: OneDrive a turd. I’m ashamed for having supported it for so long. But it’s really Microsoft that should be red-faced about dumping that steamer on the internet.

My son is refereeing a few games during a kids’ soccer tournament this weekend. He reffed his first two games last night.

When he went to the scorekeeper’s table after the games to report the scores, he reported the teams based on the colour of their shirts, the only quality he had to go with. The woman managing the scorekeeping table asked what “team number” each team was. Another young woman entered the conversation and referred to the teams by their sponsors. All of a sudden there were three labelling methodologies in play for these kids’ soccer teams:

Shirt colour

Team number

Sponsor name

That’s pretty complicated for a soccer tournament for 7- to 9-year olds. It all got sorted out, but the conversation to communicate the final scores was like something out of an Abbot and Costello routine.